Border Industrialization Program Research Articles

Ciudad Juárez: Saga of a Legendary Border City by Oscar J. Martínez

Reviewed by: Ciudad Juárez: Saga of a Legendary Border City by Oscar J. Martínez William F. Manger Ciudad Juárez: Saga of a Legendary Border City. Oscar J. Martínez. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018. Pp. xi+330, photographs, tables, appendix, bibliography, notes, index. $90.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-0-8165-3721-1. $29.95, paperback, ISBN 978-0-8165-3722-8. Mexican border cities have long had an "unsavory reputation" in the United States and even interior Mexico (x). North of the border they are often associated with vice tourism, undocumented migration, the loss of factory jobs, drug trafficking, and violence. This is particularly true of Ciudad Juárez, the oldest and largest border city, which is the focus of historian Oscar Martínez's book, Ciudad Juárez: Saga of a Legendary Border City. Martínez, who grew up in Juárez, attended school in El Paso, and taught at the University of Texas at El Paso for many years, is the consummate guide to the economic and social history of Juárez and reminds readers that, as Mexico's sixth largest city, it also "represents a vibrant community" (4). This work expands on the author's first book, Border Boom Town: Ciudad Juárez since 1848, a classic in border studies published in 1978 [End Page 161] (University of Texas Press). The first seven chapters of the original work have been significantly revised using more recent publications and primary documents from both sides of the border. Moreover, the author broadens his discussion of illegal activities prior to 1980, and particularly the illicit trade in drugs, in an effort to better understand "the origin and evolution of the extraordinary lawlessness" that has beset Juárez and other border cities in recent decades (6). The book also has three additional chapters (ch. 8–10) that chronicle events from the past forty years emphasizing the rapid growth of the maquiladora industry, the international drug trade, and the unwieldy expansion of the city and its population since 1980. The first seven chapters focus on the major themes in Border Boom Town, including the impact of the railroads, the push for a free trade zone, the Mexican Revolution, Prohibition, the Great Depression, World War II, and the expansion of the city's commercial and industrial sectors in the 1960s. They further emphasize the boom-and-bust cycles that adversely impacted the city and its residents following the arrival of railroads in the early 1880s and Juárez's increasing dependence on its twin city across the river. The exception to this was the years between 1885 and 1905, when a zona libre (free zone) was established along the border, and Juárez came to surpass El Paso economically. Following the elimination of the free zone, however, tourism increasingly served as the basis of its economy, leading to a growing external orientation. This further expanded with the enactment of Prohibition in 1919 when Juárez and other border cities turned to vice tourism and experienced a rise in smuggling and the international drug trade. The city was severely impacted by the end of Prohibition in 1933, however, as many saloons and gambling houses, along with other related businesses, closed or relocated north of the border. The city's reliance on tourism ended in the 1960s with the initiation of the National Border Program (PRONAF) in 1961 and the Border Industrialization Program (BIP) in 1965, which promoted industrialization through foreign-owned assembly plants known as maquiladoras. The goal of the former program was to expand the city's commercial and industrial sectors and reduce residents' reliance on El Paso for their shopping needs, while BIP sought to alleviate the high rates of unemployment. Juárez became the leading center for the maquiladora industry, [End Page 162] but the expansion of domestic industry was never fully realized as residents continued to spend much of their income in El Paso. The final three chapters focus on the post-1980 period, when Juárez "solidified its position as the maquiladora capital of Mexico" (147). Low wages and peso devaluations, however, resulted in a decline in the standard of living for workers. By the end...

Immigration restrictions in the real world

In Do Duties to Outsiders Entail Open Borders? Shelley Wilcox argues that, even if we adopt relational rather than luck egalitarianism, egalitarian duties of justice may require countries like the United States to open their borders to at least some foreigners. In particular, Wilcox details the negative effects the Border Industrialization Program (BIP) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have had on Mexican maquiladora workers and corn farmers, among others. Given these harms, Wilcox argues that Americans have duties to these disadvantaged Mexicans, duties that can be satisfactorily discharged only through allowing open immigration over the U.S./Mexican border. For a variety of reasons, I am not convinced that Wilcoxs arguments undermine my conclusion that legitimate states are entitled to design and enforce their own immigration policies.

A határ menti együttműködés lehetőségei, korlátai és eredményei az El Paso – Ciudad Juárez régióban

A tanulmány El Paso és Ciudad Juárez ikervárosának példáján mutatja be az USA–mexikói határon átívelő együttműködési kezdeményezések alapvető jellemzőit. A határtérség általános földrajzi kontextusa, valamint az egyes projektek fő jellemzői mellett bemutatjuk a kooperációt elősegítő, illetve azt hátráltató társadalmi, politikai és gazdasági tényezőket. Feltárjuk, miként akadályozza az intenzív helyi szintű kooperációt a helyi elitek gazdasági és politikai motivációinak különbözősége, valamint a két város gazdasági egyenlőtlenségeinek fennmaradásában való érdekeltsége egy olyan közegben, ahol egyébként a határ két oldalán lakó népesség kulturális homogenitása, közös identitása alapvetően adott. Elemezzük továbbá a határzónát érintő szövetségi szintű kezdeményezéseket, különös tekintettel ezek relatív sikerességére a gazdasági együttműködés területén. Ugyanakkor azonosítjuk a kooperáció kiteljesedését ezen a szinten is nehezítő tényezőket, amelyek a kétségtelen eredmények ellenére komolyan akadályozzák a kapcsolatok további elmélyülését.

Tijuana: Border, Migration, and Gated Communities

Tijuana: Border, Migration, and Gated Communities Brisa Violeta Carrasco Gallegos Northern Mexico’s border cities have experienced the most accelerated demographic growth of any region in the country as a result of internal migration. Many among this migrant population arrive at the border looking for an opportunity to cross into the United States. But, when faced with the difficulties that this entails, they end up settling temporarily in border cities, eventually taking on work and other commitments there. What was to be a temporary stay thus becomes permanent . Government initiatives, such as the 1942 Bracero program and the 1965 Border Industrialization Program (BIP) figure prominently in the diverse range of factors stimulating the mass migration of workers into northern Mexico (Zenteno 1993: 15–19; Verduzco, Bringas, and Valenzuela 1995: 88). This paper analyzes the most recent trend affecting demographic change: Tijuana’s real estate and construction boom, its effects on the rapid expansion of the city’s surface area, and the relationship of such expansion to the growth of gated communities. It takes as a point of reference data generated in a field study conducted in Tijuana during October 2004 and March 2005.1 Tijuana evinces all of the processes of big border cities: large-scale population growth and expansion of its urban surface area, increased opportunities for work, and fast-paced exchange of goods and services. The city developed much later than many other cities in Northwest Mexico, but its growth has been explosive. In 1900 Tijuana had 242 inhabitants (Zenteno 1993: 13). By 2005, this number had skyrocketed to 1,448,944 (CONAPO n.d.). Within these dynamics of population growth the border city becomes a context of multiple realities and multiple lifeways, a place expressing the restlessness and fears of its diverse inhabitants. For many of those residents native to the border cities, or at least with deeper roots there, the floating population seems dangerous, Brisa Violeta Carrasco Gallegos is a Ph.D. candidate in social sciences at the Universidad de Guadalajara. Journal of the Southwest 51, 4 (Winter 2009) : 457–475 458 ✜ Journal of the Southwest problematic, and harmful. Long-term residents understand the latter as temporary inhabitants poised at a point of crossing. Migrants are thus often blamed for the urban problems, traffic jams, apparent misery, delinquency, and insecurity experienced every day in cities like Tijuana. This association becomes part of the urban imaginary and, indeed, the built environment: different social groups struggle to maintain some semblance of community, creating spaces within which they are able to identify with and understand their peers. In the border cities, we thus see a proliferation of restricted or gated housing developments, creating places only social equals have the right to inhabit. They are based on an ideal of security within a carefully delimited space. While the phenomenon of the gated development is not specific to the border, it nevertheless takes on greater meaning in cities with high indices of insecurity like the border cities. For residents of gated communities , the car is critical for managing the family’s security and its property. Social segregation is a characteristic of the border urban zones, with the housing and service districts characterized by social groups of similar income levels and ethnic background, among other things. “The reality of each city, its urban history, has generated both mixed areas and other areas of homogeneity” (Borja and Muxí 2000: 63). The novelty that this model presents lies in the physical materialization of distinct boundaries separating peer groups, the meticulous vision of the future in housing choices, and the tacit limitations to access. As J. Blakely and M. G. Snyder argue, Economic and social segregation are not new. In fact, zoning and city planning were designed, in part, to preserve the position of the privileged with subtle variances in building and density codes. But gated communities go further in several aspects than other means of exclusion. They create physical barriers to access. They also privatize community space, not merely individual space. Many gated areas also privatize civic responsibilities like police protection and communal services such as street maintenance, recreation and entertainment. The new developments can create a private world that need share little with...

Strapping the Mexican Woman Immigrant: The Convergence of Reproduction and Production

Although more than half of the immigrants to the United States since the 1930s have been women (Houstoun, Kramer, and Barrett 1984), until the last two decades males were exceptionally predominant among Mexican immigrants (Donate 1993, Zahniser 2000), especially the undocumented. numbers are converging, however, for at least five reasons. First, on a transnational level, the once typical patterns of male recurrent migration, with multiple border crossings over a working career, has been replaced by a pattern of more permanent This is partially due to the dynamics of migration network maturation, involving the establishment of daughter communities abroad (e.g. Massey 1990, Massey et al. 1987), but also, and perhaps more importantly, because of tightening of the border through adding border patrol agents and utilizing military technology for detention purposes and efforts such as Operation Gatekeeper in California and Operation Hold-the-Line in Texas, have made the border crossing both psychically and economically more costly and highly dangerous (Dunn 1996, Massey et al. 2003, Nevins 2002, Zahniser 2000). mounting death toll along the border as the undocumented move toward the Arizona desert, where formal vigilance has been less, have lead to longer and longer time periods spent in the United States, and a greater tendency toward permanent or semi-permanent1 settlement (Massey et al. 2003). This more permanent settlement has led to a desire for family reunification, especially on the part of wives, who may migrate to join husbands even if not under husband's auspices, but rather that of kin or friends (HondagneuSotelo 1994, Mummert 1994). Second, on the U.S. national level, provisions of immigration legislation, such as that of the 1986 Immigration Control and Reform Act (IRCA) that provided amnesty to at least 2.3 million of the Mexican undocumented (Bean et al. 1989), had family reunification provisions paralleling other immigration legislation concerned with documented immigration. Thus women's (and children's) migration was facilitated (Cornelius 1989, 1991).2 Third, and on a more social-psychological level, is a changing family dynamic in Mexico which includes a stress on companionate marriage among women in their mid-thirties and younger (Hirsch 2000, 2003). As Hirsch (2003:150) explains: Young women...make migration and marital togetherness an explicit negotiation point during courtship. Before they marry they tell their boyfriends that if they are planning to go north they should save or borrow to pay the coyote for both of them, because no me voy a casarpara estarsola (I am not getting married to be alone). Hirsch (2003:150) concludes: The ideology of companionate marriage lends weight to women's desire to participate in the previously largely male adventure of migration. Among other contributing factors were the increasing involvement of women in formal sector waged manufacturing work and services since the initiation of the Border Industrialization Program in 1965 and with tourism development programs begun in the early 1970s, and spreading throughout Mexico, even into some rural areas (Arias 1994, Mummert 1994, Wilson, n.d.). More and more women on the Mexican side of the border thus had experience in waged-labor. Also, during the 1980s job openings in the lowskilled, low-waged sectors of the U.S. economy offered more jobs to women. Fourth, a higher proportion of Mexican women have entered and been driven into, the labor force because of periodic economic crises in Mexico since 1982 (Cornelius 1993:342; Gonzalez de la Rocha 1991, 2001; Roberts et al. 1999:241-243). Due to successive peso devaluations, high inflation, structural adjustment policies that cut urban and rural subsidies and privatized the economy, women and children were forced into income-generating activities in the informal sector and wage labor in the formal sector at unprecedented rates, in an attempt to maintain the value of the household wage. …

Ciudadana X: Gender Violence and the Denationalization of Women's Rights in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico

Cuánto falta en México para el pleno ejercicio de la democracia? . . . La clase gobernante desprecia lo que ve o cree ver: masas ingobernables por irredimibles, masas indóciles y sumisas, masas regidas por el complicado matrimonio entre la obedencia y el relajo. En el otro extremo, quienes ejercen la democracia desde abajo y sin pedir permiso, amplían sus derechos ejerciéndolos.1 —Carlos Monsiváis, Entrada Libre (1987) From the beginning the paradox involved in the declaration of inalienable human rights was that it reckoned with an "abstract" human being who seemed to exist nowhere . . . —Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, is not New York, Tokyo, Paris, or even Mexico City. Nevertheless, it shares with these global cities all the markers of a denationalized metropolitan space where new forms of sociality emerge with the migration of people, goods, and capital across [End Page 255] national borders (Sassen 2001).2 Since the establishment of the Border Industrialization Program in 1965, the city has contributed a vast supply of labor and resources to the reformation of industrial and financial capital. The information technologies that support the "global cultural economy" are made en masse in the city's maquiladoras by workers for whom consumption is only slightly less compulsory than their high levels of productivity (Appadurai 1996, 29). Decades before the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico experimented with political projects that would suspend national sovereignty in the border space in favor of attracting foreign exchange.3 Following the crises of the mid-1980s, Mexico's neo-liberal program of economic privatization and deregulation entailed the wholesale conversion of the northern border into a platform for cheap labor and out-migration. The integration of world markets, the expansion of transnational corporate power, and the concurrent displacements of peoples from southern Mexico have, in their turn, produced urban forms in Ciudad Juárez bearing the distinct signature of globalization's restructuring of the nation-state. This article examines the troubling status of poor migrant women as political actors in the denationalized space of Ciudad Juárez. Subaltern women's labors have served the state as a stabilizing force amidst the economic and political crises of the neo-liberal regime in ways that both promote and delimit new forms of female agency in the border region. The acute rise in armed social conflict in Juárez, much of it targeted at young women and girls, requires that we examine how the denationalized subjectivity that has occupied recent scholarship on globalization and citizenship is itself produced through state failure and state violence. The impunity of violent crime necessarily devalues both citizenship and citizens: it produces a climate where sociality is defined less by national belonging than by the more atomizing force of collective fear.4 If globalization has in fact encouraged the disarticulation of citizenship rights from membership to a single national community, as many analysts maintain, it is nevertheless unclear whether subaltern Mexican women can make substantive claims to the global civil society that the Juárez industries have helped to produce. [End Page 256] Recent scholarship on citizenship contends that changes in the nation-state that result from several aspects of globalization "significantly alter those conditions that in the past fed the articulation between citizenship and the nation-state" (Sassen 2003, 41).5 Saskia Sassen writes that the processes of market integration, coupled with the expansion of the international human rights regime, enabled the "deterritorializing of citizenship practices and identities," just as they "have directly and indirectly altered particular features of the institution of citizenship" (42). Although scholars hold no clear consensus on what constitutes the precise substance of denationalized citizenship, the term enjoys currency both as an expression of an "aspirational claim" to new forms...

Social Aspects of Labor Organizing: Maquiladora Workers in a Grassroots Development Effort

Beginning in the mid-1960s, Mexico encouraged the development of industrial assembly plants known as maquiladoras along its northern border and in selected areas of the interior. Although it began as a stopgap measure to employ men returning from the U.S. bracero worker program, the Border Industrialization Program soon became Mexico’s principal development initiative for the border region. Since then, numerous scholars have evaluated the success of the plants by examining their impacts on the economy, the environment, and labor. This study adds to this research literature by assessing the impact of the maquiladora program from the perspective of the assembly line workers. It describes and analyzes the activities of a grassroots, participatory development effort to organize maquiladora workers for more than 20 years. Participatory approaches to development are defined and described in terms of the problems and challenges that animate this field of research. The findings demonstrate how participatory efforts at organizing constitute one of the few avenues available to workers to resist factory exploitation and improve their general well-being. The study confirms some of the shortcomings of participatory development theory, such as its conceptual ambiguity, significant time commitment, and general cumbersomeness, but it provides justifications for its continuance.

Time, Space, and Articulation in the Economic Development of the U.S.-Mexico Border Region from 1940 to 2000

Concepts of world-system and articulation of modes of production are used to analyze the economic development of the U.S.-Mexico border region. The designation of centers and of periphery, semiperiphery, and core depends on the nature of the economic activity, where it takes place, and the destinations of the value derived. Assignment of periphery and semiperiphery changes, depending on where the resource is produced, distributed, consumed, and where capital accumulation occurs, as well as to the nature of the commodity. For example, maquilas that assemble products in peripheral regions are tied to plants (semiperipheries) on the U.S. side of the border, from which they receive components to assemble and where they deliver the finished product, but also to transnational corporations in other parts of the U.S. where profit accrues in centers. Production, distribution, and consumption centers exist in the core, periphery, and semiperiphery, where these activities take place. The following topics are reviewed as commodities and articulatory mechanisms: agricultural development, urbanization, labor, the retail and tourism industries and the contraband trade, and the establishment of the Border Industrialization Program.

The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender, and Ecology on the U.S.-Mexico Border

Reviewed by: The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender, and Ecology on the U.S.-Mexico Border * Brian Greenberg (bio) The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender, and Ecology on the U.S.-Mexico Border. By Devon G. Peña. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. Pp. xi+460; tables, notes, bibliography, index. $45 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). Near the end of Clockwork, Eric Breibart’s perceptive 1982 documentary on scientific management, deskilling, and the computerized factory, the narrator observes that Frederick Winslow Taylor suffered from a recurrent nightmare throughout his life. Each night Taylor would dream that he was trapped in a giant machine from which he struggled vainly to free himself. Taylor’s nightmare provides the film with its ironic coda. In formulating his principles of scientific management, Taylor saw himself creating the basis of an “industrial utopia,” one in which every human motion was regulated with clockwork precision. Nevertheless, “in his dreams there was still resistance.” Devon G. Peña also concludes The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender, and Ecology on the U.S.-Mexico Border by recounting a nightmare, one from his childhood. Here again the monster is mechanical, in Peña’s dream a cotton gin located next to the train tracks that ran by his barrio home in Laredo, Texas. When he was about ten, his grandmother led him to the tracks to confront his demons. As a train appeared, she picked up a stone, put it in Devon’s hand, and told him, “Don’t be afraid of that train. Here throw rocks at it and defend yourself!” (pp. 333–34). The moral for Peña, and the coda for his book, is that resistance to “the terror of the machine” is not only necessary but liberating. [End Page 158] Drawing on ten years of field research and personal activism, Peña has written a passionate indictment of the human and environmental devastation wrought in the maquiladoras, the foreign-owned, automotive-parts and consumer-electronics assembly plants along the U.S.-Mexico border. Peña chronicles the attempt by transnational corporations operating under the Border Industrialization Program, a bilateral agreement negotiated in 1965 by the United States and Mexico, to impose first-world technology on third-world workers. Peña describes factory production and workplace organization in the maquilas as a destructive mix of Taylorism (the principles of scientific management), Fordism (Henry Ford’s system of factory control based on mass production and automated, assembly-line technology), and the social engineering theories of “managerial sociology” associated with Elton Mayo and George Homans. But the “politics of production,” that is, the resistance of workers to management domination, is what most engages Peña. The strongest parts of the book resonate with the voices of maquila workers engaged in shop-floor struggles and other forms of resistance. Juana Ortega is typical of the more than two hundred workers, most of whom were women, interviewed by Peña. Through tortuguismo—working at the pace of a turtle—maquila workers like Ortega resist becoming automatons, the helpless victims described by management theorists and even radical scholars (especially as presented by Harry Braverman in Labor and Monopoly Capital [New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974]). Ortega is proud of her skills and determined to improve her lot and that of workers like herself. An ally in maquila workers’ collective struggle to create alternatives to maquiladora industrialization has been the Center for the Orientation of Women Workers (COMO). Organized in 1968, COMO is a grassroots movement to promote workplace democracy and ecologically sustainable development. In the early 1980s, Peña participated in COMO’s “transference project,” an effort to document the innovations and inventiveness of maquila assembly-line workers and then develop strategies and programs, such as worker-owned, self-managed cooperatives, that would transfer, or better, translate, these skills into general efforts to improve working and living conditions. Covering mainly the years before the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect in 1994, The Terror of the Machine succeeds best as a vehicle for articulating the human costs of globalization in Mexico and other developing areas of the world. But can there be victimization...

Maquila Industry impacts on the spatial redistribution of employment

The Border Industrialization Program (BIP) of 1965 that gave rise to the maquiladora industry offered not only jobs to northern region Mexicans, many of whom had seen their seasonal U.S. jobs in the Bracero Program terminated, but also provided a cheaper source of labor for competitively hard-pressed U.S. manufacturing capital (Gruben 1990 and WEFA-CIEMEX 1988). The latter rationale, of course, is the basis for continuing legislative support until the recent passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), even as the U.S. rank and file has been distressed about eroding jobs and real wages. The sectoral, factor share and demographic incidence of benefits and losses of the maquiladora program have been of concern for public policy (Sklair 1989, Stoddard 1987 and Wilson 1992); so also is the spatial distribution of BIP impacts. Politicians representing the northern U.S. industrial manufacturing belt states decry the loss of blue collar jobs to Mexico, while chambers of commerce and lobbyists representing U.S. border states cite results from local multiplier impact studies showing positive local job gains (Michie 1987, Mitchell and Vargas 1987, Patrick 1989 and Pavlakovic 1991). The passage of NAFTA will change the pattern of impacts of the maquiladoras. For example, NAFTA reduces protectionist rules, such as the requirement that American owned maquiladoras must purchase inputs only from American suppliers. NAFTA will produce a broader array of economic impacts than did the BIP legislation, but they are similar in one respect. This is in encouraging investment shifts from the U.S. to Mexico to gain lower production costs for goods destined for U.S. markets. To this extent, this study is pertinent to the current NAFTA environment. For this, and to understand historical impacts of the BIP, it is of interest to estimate the spatial impacts of the maquiladora program as it has been implemented. Consequently, this study assesses the relative magnitude of employment gains and losses across U.S. geographic regions due to the BIP.

The manufacturing process cycle and the industrialization of the United States-Mexico borderlands

This article introduces the concept of the manufacturing process cycle and provides a general analysis of the developmental dynamics of industrialization, comparing U.S. industrial heartland regions with the United States-Mexico border area. The manufacturing process cycle focuses on corporate organizational behavior as a major factor influencing industry shifts and relocations. It assumes that the strategic priorities of corporate decision-making will vary according to the temporal stage of development of each industry's production process. Seven indexes and selected 3- and 4-digit industry data from U.S. regions and border states (1947–1977) and from Mexico's Border Industrialization Program (1974–1981) are analyzed to provide indications of temporal changes and phases of process development in selected border industries. The analysis concludes that, within general parameters, the performances of the majority of the various industries surveyed conform to the assumptions of the manufacturing process cycle.

Maquiladoras and Migration: Workers in the Mexico-United States Border Industrialization Program

Maquiladoras and Migration: Workers in the Mexico-United States Border Industrialization Program

Factor utilization in Mexico's border industrialization program

This paper examines the factor proportions characteristics of northern Mexico's rapidly growing border industrialization program, which has been promoted by policies in both the United States and in Mexico. A comparison of border industries with Mexican domestic regional industries suggests that Mexico's foreign-owned border industries (maquiladoras) are more labor intensive than has previously been assumed for such export enclave operations. It is therefore concluded that Mexico's border industrialization conforms to the patterns predicted by industry and product life cycle theory.

Chicanos and the Border Cities: An Interpretive Essay

research for this paper was made possible by a grant from the Ford Foundation. 'As used in this work, the term refers to the line of demarcation separating Mexico and the United States and to the narrow land strips immediately adjacent to that line on both sides and extending to the limits of the U.S. counties and Mexican municipalities within the zone. In the historiography of the U.S.-Mixico border, the greatest emphasis is placed on international conflict and diplomatic relations between the two countries. Although listed in a broader multidisciplinary context, references to historical works dealing with the border may be found in Charles C. Cumberland, The United States-Mexican Border: A Selective Guide to the Literature of the Region, Supplement to Rural Sociology, XXV (June 1960); and Ellwyn R. Stoddard, ed., The Status of U.S.-Mexico Borderlands Studies: A Multidisciplinary Symposium, Social Science Journal, combined double issue, XII-XIII (1975-1976), 3-112. 2Attracted by the area's rapid population growth, increased urbanization, and incipient economic development, sociologists, economists, and geographers have accelerated their border research since the mid-1960s. Important works published in the last decade include William V. D'Antonio and William H. Form, Influentials in Two Border Cities: A Study of Community Decision Making (Notre Dame, 1965); David North, Mexican Border Crossers: People Who Live in Mexico and Work in the United States (Washington, D.C., 1970); C. Daniel Dillman, Urban Growth along Mexico's Northern Border and the Mexican National Border Program, Journal of Developing Areas, IV (1970), 487-508; Donald W. Baerresen, Border Industrialization Program of Mexico (Lexington, Mass., 1971); Julian Samora, Los Mojados (Notre Dame, 1971); John A.

The border industrialization program of Mexico

The International ExecutiveVolume 14, Issue 1 p. 15-17 Research Roundup The border industrialization program of Mexico Donald W. Baerresen, Donald W. Baerresen Director of Research Center for International Business, Los AngelesSearch for more papers by this author Donald W. Baerresen, Donald W. Baerresen Director of Research Center for International Business, Los AngelesSearch for more papers by this author First published: Winter 1972 https://doi.org/10.1002/tie.5060140110Citations: 1AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume14, Issue1Winter 1972Pages 15-17 RelatedInformation

Borderland, Maquilas, and Feminicide

The rise of maquiladoras, or foreign owned manufacturing plants, in Mexico during the 1970s and 80s symbolizes the social and economic tension of the Mexican–United States borderland. With the implementation of agreements like the Border Industrialization Program (1965) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994) that created and supported the transfer of capital and goods between Mexico and the United States, such policies simultaneously limited the movement of people across the border. By the 1990s, growing disparities between the U.S. and Mexico became evident with the mass movement of Mexican economic migrants to the north and the growth of shanty towns south of the border. Women migrants and labourers in particular faced extremely vulnerable positions in the region due to their precarious work and living conditions, substantiated by the paralleling disappearance, kidnapping, and mutilation of women in the borderlands. This article mobilizes Ursula Biemann’s (1999) work on women’s positionality in Mexico to situate their experiences and agency in Mexico’s border town, Ciudad Juarez, within contexts of prevailing feminicide. Ultimately, in engaging in the discussion of the role of what Melissa Wright (2006) calls women’s disposability in the borderlands, this essay will explore why transnational and migrant labour is often overlooked and exploited by policy, leaving women labourers particularly susceptible to such violence.